Writer – Photographer – Visual Artist
Morning fog moves in through secluded Hamilton Cove. The rising tide seethes the stony shore. Out there, two loons exchange calls. A buoy moans. Life moves through space and time, its clock is light and darkness. Rising and falling. Each ebbing erodes the shore.
It is the end of another August low tide in Lubec, Maine. The men have been clam digging around the Spark Plug lighthouse that marks the center of the dangerous salt water channel that has been known to take lives and engulf unsuspecting tourists whom foolhardily drive out on the mudflats. The encroaching sea pours in from the cold-waters of the Bay of Fundy. It drives the clam diggers from the mud flats before their vehicles are engulfed by the rapidly-rising waters. With a hundred pounds or more of soft-shell clams dug from the mud-flats, these hard-working men and women will cash in their harvest for another day’s work. Many will return by nightfall with headlamps blazing to dig another batch for a double-payday.
This is life in Downeast Lubec, Maine
“Who knows their birth?” – Mandala Hymn
“The sea will rise over Babylon; its roaring waves will cover her.” – Book of Jeremiah
“With birth there comes the rush of sorrows, only in Nirvâna is there joy.” – The Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King: A Life of Buddha
“And beheld before him every creature, as one sees images upon a mirror; all creatures born and born again to die, noble and mean, the poor and rich, reaping the fruit of right or evil doing, and sharing happiness or misery in consequence.” – The Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King: A Life of Buddha
“When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place.” – Sacred Gita
“It has looked out from its dull eye for so long, standing on one leg, on moon and stars sparkling through silence and dark, and now what a rich experience is its! What says it of stagnant pools, and reeds, and damp night fogs? It would be worth while to look in the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours and in such solitudes. When I behold that dull yellowish green, I wonder if my own soul is not a bright invisible green. I would fain lay my eye side by side with its and learn of it.” – Thoreau
“So too countless hidden treasures came of themselves from the earth.” – The Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King: A Life of Buddha
Paul Maher Jr. 